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Grouping Nodes

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Applies To: Microsoft HPC Pack 2008 R2, Microsoft HPC Pack 2012, Microsoft HPC Pack 2012 R2

A node group is a named collection of nodes. Nodes can belong to more than one group. There are several default node groups, including HeadNodes, WCFBrokerNodes, ComputeNodes, and WorkstationNodes. (Depending on the version of Microsoft® HPC Pack that you have installed, UnmanagedServerNodes, and AzureNodes might also be available as default node groups.) The role of the node determines to which group the node belongs. For more information, see Understanding Node Roles in Microsoft HPC Pack.

You can create custom node groups to:

  • Monitor, manage, and diagnose all the nodes in a group at once.

  • Filter the node list by node group, and then run commands or perform actions on the returned subset of nodes.

  • Simplify job resource allocation. Define the Node Groups job property in your Job Templates so that certain types of jobs run on certain types of nodes. For example, for jobs that require “AppX”, create a template with the node group property equal to “HaveAppX”.

  • Facilitate resource selection for individual jobs. For example, if a user submits a job that specifies the node groups “HaveAppX” and “HaveBigMemory”, then the job will only run on nodes that fall into both groups. See also Job properties.

The following procedure describes how to group nodes in HPC Cluster Manager.

To group nodes

  1. In Node Management, in the Navigation Pane, click Nodes.

  2. In Heat Map or List view, select one or more nodes.

  3. Right-click your selection, point to Groups, then click New Group.

  4. In the Add Group dialog box, type a name and a description for the new group.

    Note

    The node group name must not contain a comma (,).

  5. Click OK to join the selected nodes to the new group. The new group appears in the Navigation Pane under By Group.

  6. Assign nodes to a group:

    Right-click one or more nodes, point to Groups, then from the list of groups, select the group that you want the node to join.

  7. Remove nodes from a group.

    Right-click one or more nodes, point to Groups, then from the list of groups, clear the check mark next to the group from which you want to remove the node. Note that if you select more than one node at a time, only the groups that apply to all of the selected nodes are indicated with a check mark.

Note

In the Navigation Pane, click By Group to view a list of node groups in the views pane, and to edit the name or description of your custom groups. Click a group to see group properties and the list of member nodes in the Details Pane.

Additional considerations

  • If you are adding nodes to your cluster by importing a node XML file, you can associate properties to nodes at the time of deployment. For example, in the XML file you can specify the names of the node groups to which each node should be added.

  • For information about using HPC Cluster Manager, see Overview of HPC Cluster Manager.

Additional references